Needless to say, marketing has evolved at breakneck speed since then, sprouting many more types of marketing. Some are definitely more effective and relevant than others, so read on to learn about the top types of marketing around today.

The Ultimate List of Types of Marketing

1. Account-based Marketing

Account-based marketing (ABM) is a hyper focused marketing strategy where teams treat an individual prospect or customer like its very own market. Marketing teams create content, host events, and launch entire campaigns dedicated to the people associated with that account, rather than the industry as a whole.

3. Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is when an online retailer rewards a website with a commission for each customer they refer through their promotion of one of the online retailers’ products. The website, often called an affiliate, will only get paid when their promotion generates a sale.

4. Brand Marketing

Brand marketing is shaping your brand’s public perception and forging an emotional connection with your target audience through storytelling, creativity, humor, and inspiration.

5. Buzz Marketing

Buzz marketing is a viral marketing strategy that leverages refreshingly creative content, interactive events, and community influencers to generate word-of-mouth marketing and anticipation for the product or service the brand is about to launch.

6. Campus Marketing

Campus marketing is hiring college students to become campus ambassadors for your brand. They usually market your products or services to other students by setting up booths around campus or hosting giveaways.

7. Cause Marketing

Cause marketing is a type of corporate social responsibility that aims to simultaneously improve society and boost a brand’s awareness by promoting and supporting a charitable cause.

8. Content Marketing

Content marketing is a creating, publishing, and distributing content to your target audience. The most common components of a content marketing program are social media networks, blogs, visual content, and premium content assets, like tools, ebooks, or webinars.

9. Contextual Marketing

Contextual marketing is targeting online users with different ads on websites and social media networks based on their online browsing behavior.

10. Conversational Marketing

Conversational marketing is the ability to have 1:1 personal conversations across multiple channels, meeting customers how, when, and where they want. It is more than just live chat, extending to phone calls, texts, Facebook Messenger, email, Slack, and more.

11. Controversial Marketing

Controversial marketing doesn’t aim to polarize an audience. It’s an attention-grabbing technique for stating an opinion, and brands use it to spark productive conversations about certain moral values. In recent years, any stance taken on sensitive social issues can be considered controversial marketing.

12. Customer Marketing

Customer marketing is focusing on retaining your existing customers, delighting them with your product or service and customer service, and turning them into advocates for your brand who can spread the word about your brand.

13. Digital Marketing

Digital marketing encompasses all marketing efforts that use an electronic device or the internet. Businesses leverage digital channels such as search engines, social media, email, and other websites to connect with current and prospective customers.

14. Email Marketing

Email marketing is sending educational or entertaining content and promotional messages to people who willingly subscribe to your email newsletter. You can also use email marketing to nurture leads with content that moves them along the buyer’s journey.

15. Event Marketing

Event marketing is planning, organizing, and executing an event for the purpose of promoting a brand, product, or service. Events can take place in-person or online, and companies can either host an event, attend as an exhibitor, or participate as a sponsor.

16. Experiential Marketing

Experiential marketing are in-person events, experiences, and interactions that forge lasting emotional connections between a brand and their target audience.

17. Field Marketing

Field marketing is creating sales enablement content like case studies, product overviews, competitor comparisons, and more to help sales close their prospects into customers during the last stage of the buyer’s journey.

18. Global Marketing

Global marketing is focusing on the needs of potential buyers in other countries. Typically, a global marketing strategy requires a business to do new market research, identify countries where the business’s product might be successful, and then localize the brand to reflect the needs of those communities.

20. Inbound Marketing

Inbound marketing is creating valuable experiences that have a positive impact on people and your business by attracting prospects and customers to your website through relevant and helpful content. Once they arrive, you engage with them using conversational tools like email and chat and by promising continued value. Finally, you delight them by continuing to act as an empathetic advisor and expert.

Unlike outbound marketing, with inbound marketing, you don’t need to fight for your potential customers’ attention. By creating content designed to address the problems and needs of your ideal customers, you attract qualified prospects and build trust and credibility for your business.

21. Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing is designed to tap into an existing community of engaged followers on social media. Influencers are considered experts in their niches. These individuals have a large influence over an audience you might be trying to reach, and can be helpful marketing to those buyers.

22. Informative Marketing

Informative marketing focuses more on the facts and less on emotions. This marketing tactic highlights how your product’s features and benefits solve your customers’ problems and can even compare your product to your competitors’ product. Although this type of marketing relies on facts and figures to trigger a desired action, it’s usually framed in a compelling way.

23. Interactive Marketing

Interactive marketing is an innovative type of marketing where your audience can interact with engaging visuals or videos within your content. This new form of marketing unleashes your creativity and, in turn, allows you to tell more gripping stories, crowning it as one of the best ways to capture your audience’s attention.

24. Multicultural Marketing

Multicultural marketing is devising and executing a marketing campaign that targets people of different ethnicities and cultures within a brand’s overarching audience. Not only does it help you relate to and resonate with minority groups, but it also recognizes their ethnicities and cultures and helps majority groups realize that most countries are melting pots and not dominated by one main ethnicity or culture.

25. Native Marketing

Native marketing is when brands pay reputable publishers to collaborate in the creative process of crafting a sponsored article or video that covers one of the publisher’s main topics and looks like a regular piece of content on their website. They also pay these publishers to distribute this sponsored content to their massive audience through social media and their website. In sum, when brands pay for a publisher’s native advertising services, they can leverage their editorial expertise and reach to help their brand tell captivating stories to a bigger and better viewership.

26. Neuromarketing

Neuromarketing blends neuroscience and marketing to help brands gauge the emotional resonance of their current and future marketing campaigns. To do this, companies like Immersion Neuroscience and Spark Neuro have developed technology that can gauge certain neurochemical and physiological responses, which both signal emotional engagement while consuming marketing content.

27. Outbound Marketing

Outbound marketing is a traditional method of marketing that includes intrusive activities such as print ads, TV ads, cold calling, and email blasts.

28. Partner Marketing

Partner marketing is attracting new partners to sell your product or service to another pool of customers. At HubSpot, we have an agency partner program where inbound marketing agencies sell our product to their clients and we give our partners a cut of the revenue.

29. Personalized Marketing

30. Persuasive Marketing

Persuasive marketing focuses more on the emotions and less on the facts. It aims to make an audience feel something, associate those emotions with a brand, and trigger a desired action.

31. Product Marketing

Product marketing is bringing a product to market and driving demand for it. This includes deciding the products positioning and messaging, launching the product, and ensuring salespeople and customers understand its benefits and features.

32. Proximity Marketing

Proximity marketing is when brands use Beacons, which are Bluetooth devices that send alerts to people’s smartphones based on their proximity to one of their stores, to promote discounts to any customer who walks by one of their stores and has their app. Beacons can also pinpoint people’s location in a store and send them deals on the products and brands that are the same section as them.

33. Relationship Marketing

Relationship marketing is a type of marketing that focuses on cultivating deeper, more meaningful relationships with customers to ensure long-term brand loyalty. Relationship marketing is not focused on short-term wins or sales transactions. Instead, it’s focused on delighting an audience and your customers for the long-haul.

34. Search Engine Marketing

Search engine marketing, or SEM, is optimizing content for search engines or using paid advertising to ensure that your business’s products or services are visible on search engine results pages (SERPs). When a user types in a certain keyword, SEM enables your business to appear as a top result for that search query.

35. Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing is creating content to promote your brand and products on various social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Your unique content should be tailored to the specific platform you share it on to help you boost your post’s reach.

36. Stealth Marketing

Stealth marketing is when a brand hires actors or celebrities or uses pseudonyms to promote their product or service without consumers realizing they’re being marketed to. Some examples of stealth marketing are hiring actors to subtly promote products to the public, sockpuppeting, paying influencers to post about a product or service without disclosing that it’s actually an ad, creating fake viral videos, and product placement in movies.

37. User-generated Marketing

User-generated marketing is when businesses ask the public for ideas, information, and opinions on social media or run contests to help them craft better marketing material, like a logo, jingle, or commercial.

38. Video Marketing

Video marketing is creating videos and uploading them to your website, YouTube, and social media to boost brand awareness, generate conversions, and close deals.

39. Voice Marketing

Voice marketing is leveraging smart speakers like Amazon Alexa and Google Home to educate people and answer questions about their topics of interest.

40. Word of Mouth Marketing

Word of mouth marketing is customers’ recommendations of a brand, which is the most trusted form of marketing today. To create as much word of mouth marketing as possible, you need to stay laser-focused on developing the best product or service possible and providing top-notch customer service. In other words, you need to serve your customers needs before your own. Only then will your customers turn into a loyal, passionate tribe that will recommend your brand to their friends and family.